Hiroshima Mon Amour

Alain Resnais' "Hiroshima Mon Amour"-an unprecedented melding of cultural interests and aesthetic values that abstracts the global reaction to nuclear tragedy via a relationship between a French woman and a Japanese man, which is itself dominated by reverberating political phrases and cuts to images of the atrocities-is a film that invites hyperbole. The new Criterion Collection Blu-ray release includes a booklet with critical writing on the film, and you needn't look long before you find the grand pronouncements: critic Kent Jones notes that "it's possible that 'Hiroshima' is the first modern sound film in every aspect of its conception and execution-construction, rhythm, dialogue, performance style, philosophical outlook, and even musical score." Then he says it remains one of the most influential films in the history of the medium.

The critics at the legendary film journal Cahiers du Cinema, at the time of the film's release, agreed wholeheartedly. An iconic roundtable (where at least one famous film maxim, used to this day, is coined) is also included in the booklet, and the readings are equally rapturous: Eric Rohmer says that it is "a film about which you can say everything." Jacques Rivette compares it to the compositions of Stravinsky: "What Resnais is aiming at when he cuts together four tracking shots, then suddenly a static shot, two static shots, and back to the tracking shot ... is a [simultaneous] effect of opposition and an effect of profound unity." And Jean-Luc Godard, after calling the film "literature," noted that Resnais-in his melding of the political, the aesthetic, and the abstract-has miraculously created, in a visual form, "the novel that the young French novelists are all trying to write."

Criterion's Blu-ray includes over an hour of interviews, alongside many other supplemental features, that work to decode and deconstruct Resnais' work of cinema-philosophy. (For those of you who have the old Criterion DVD release: Both the HD transfer of the film itself and many of the extras are newly produced.) First off, there are two talks with actress Emmanuelle Riva: one from 1959, recorded at the time of the film's Cannes premiere, and another filmed in 2003, where she recalls memories of the production itself and its many complications (her co-actor, Eiji Okada, had to learn all of his dialogue phonetically.)

There are also two interviews with Resnais himself (one from 1961, considering his structuralist tendencies, and another from 1980, about the legacy of "Hiroshima, Mon Amour.") Another conversation talks to members of the restoration team who recently "upgraded" Resnais' film. Also included is an interview with film scholar Francois Thomas (again considering the unique qualities of the film's making) and another with Tim Page, professor of music and journalism at USC (he discusses the score, composed by Georges Delerue and Giovanni Fusco, and the integral additions it makes to the footage itself.)

And an audio commentary track, recorded by film historian Peter Cowie, works to unpack the film's rhythmic pacing and innumerable repetitions in an attempt to illustrate its impenetrable thematic density. And as you go through the film, for the 2nd and 3rd time, with and without the commentary, after the litany of critical readings and interviews, you see that it's no less impenetrable-Resnais' complex meter of dialogue and meaning never truly unveils itself. A sign of a truly great artwork: the power of the text never wavers.

"Hiroshima Mon Amour"
Blu-ray
$39.95
Criterion.com